Once the NDAS software is installed on a local machine, the NetDisk will be listed under the Local Drives heading in the My Computer explorer. For all intensive purposes, it will be treated by the operating system, and all other software as a local hard drive. In short, it will appear to work just as if it were physically attached to the computer. This is a very handy feature as some software packages, especially anti-virus and backup applications (Such as Norton Ghost) do not like Network drives.

     Another function of the NDAS software is binding all of your NetDisk units together. This can be done using the above options menu. Obviously, this will require more than one NetDisk unit on your LAN in order to function, just like you need more than one hard drive to setup any type of RAID. In fact, as you can see from the above screen shot, the phraseology is exactly the same. You identify how many, and later on which,  units you want to bind into the cluster. Because we only have one unit to test, I won't be able to benchmark the units in any of the above configurations. However, the documentation that is included with the NetDisk is very clear on exactly how to setup and what each mode achieves.  While most of us are familiar with the Stripe (RAID-0) and Mirror (RAID-1), the Aggregation mode is simply clustering all the units into one useable storage space, with a single drive letter. This would be very similar to RAID-JBOD.

      Make sure you read all the warnings, cautions, and notes in the setup manual when performing these functions. Such as making sure that no other machines have a NetDisk unit mounted to it when you enable a RAID function.  

     Once all the software is installed, you might find it handy to change the read/write access rights that some machines have to the NetDisk unit(s). This can be done very easily using the NDAS software. From this one properties screen, we can remove the write access key, leaving the machine with read only access. You can also completely remove a unit from the access control list all together.